French Soccer Star Issues Apology Laden with Regrets

One of the reasons the holier-than-thou Frenchmen are always excoriating those clueless Yankee puritans is the way that the latter are always make members of their élites, from Hollywood stars to Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton, apologize for their — alleged — misdeeds; "alleged", we write because if only the Yanks were as suave and lucid as the French, they would understand that in fact the misdeeds are only misdeeds in the minds of the traditional and mindless reactionaries and that, in today's day and age, we need to be less doctrinaire.

In that perspective, it's rather interesting to learn, via Le Monde, that football star Franck Ribéry has issued a communiqué stating exactly that: How sorry he is for what he's done (for what he did last year) and for the people that he has hurt…

C'est clair : j'ai connu une année 2010 horrible à tous points de vue. Je ne parlerai même pas des blessures qui ne m'ont pas épargné. Mais dans ma vie privée, dans mon comportement de footballeur, je me suis planté. J'ai pris des mauvaises routes, je me suis perdu. J'ai blessé des gens, des gens qui me sont très chers, j'en ai déçu voire choqué beaucoup d'autres : je m'en veux et je m'en excuse.